Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities

Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities

Chapter:

(p.120)
Chapter 7 Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities

Source:

Tactile Poetics

Author(s):

Sarah Jackson

Publisher:

Edinburgh University Press

DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748685318.003.0008

This chapter's examination of the non-human hand is informed by Jacques Derrida's challenge to the assumption that the hand is exclusive to the ‘humanual’. Recognising a growing interest in haptic technologies and the relationship between the screen and eye-contact, it addresses the role of the hand in the ‘hominizing process’, interrogating Derrida's refusal to neglect the non-human hand by considering prosthetic limb in the recently restored Fritz Lang film, Metropolis. Discussing the ways that the prosthetic supplement disrupts the opposition between the natural and the artificial, it draws attention to the co-implication of the human and the non-human that features in the film's defining handshake. Questioning the manipulations of the hand in haptic technologies and digital retouching, the chapter opens up questions regarding the virtual and spectral mediation of contact.

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